The paper, The Nature Of Countercyclical Income Risk,
finds evidence that since at least the 1980s, incomes for the
very highest income earners have become ever more sensitive to
the business cycle — and that in the latest recession, they saw
income levels fall further than anyone else.

Here's the first piece of evidence, showing how the "one percent"
suffers disproportionately during recessions. The vertical axis
shows the mean log change in income; the horizontal shows income
percentile.NBER

During recessions since 1978, the top ~95th percentile saw
changes in their incomes decline precipitously compared with
everyone else (and oddly, during expansions, their income growth
is slightly lower than everyone else's).

Next: income changes (black line) for the "one percent"
have become more and more dictated by changes in the business
cycle. As you can see, the the fluctuations have become
increasingly pronounced relative to the economy.

Fatih Guvenen, the paper's lead author, told us that the "one
percent's" link to the business cycle was not always so ironclad
— in the 1960s and 1970s, he said, data showed higher-end incomes
displayed less cyclicality.

But in recent years, upper-end income changes have become
inextricably linked to the economy's fortunes.

Guvenen believes this is a result of the absolute incomes for the
one percent having exploded in recent years — they simply possess
(and thus determine) more of the economic pie.

Becoming a lawyer or doctor entails earning an astronomical
salary, he said — but also means if you suddenly find yourself
unemployed, the change in your wages is extreme.

That's not true for other sectors of the economy, Guvenen said.
"The likelihood of being unemployed doesn't change much betw 50th
and 90th percentiles," he told us.

Finally, what happened during the past two recessions (black and
green lines) versus other recessions:

Their findings: "For the ﬁrst two recessions in our sample
period, very-high-income individuals fared better than
anybody else in the population, whereas for the latest two
recessions, there has been a remarkable reversal of these
fortunes and the highest-income workers suffered the
most."